Industry Adoption of the SystemC AMS Standard

Introduction

The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) is organizing a free public event where system integrators, modelling experts, EDA suppliers and system-level design and verification architects and engineers can share and exchange knowledge on the industrial application and benefits of using the emerging SystemC AMS 1.0 standard as the new system-level modelling language supporting mixed-signal ESL design and verification methodologies.

SystemC AMS Day is an industry-driven event organized by NXP, ST, Infineon and Fraunhofer and supported by OSCI and its sponsors. This first-time event will highlight the application of the SystemC AMS 1.0 compatible reference implementation developed and released by Fraunhofer IIS/EAS and presented by different research and industrial partners for various applications.

Scope and topics
SystemC AMS Day features industry speakers who will present the practical usage of the SystemC AMS standard in automotive, sensor, wired, wireless and other applications related to semiconductor/IC design, embedded system design and/or mixed-signal system-level architecture or concept development, addressing the following topics:

Looking for a hotel?

Why should I join this event?

Increase your productivity by smart use of SystemC AMS

The SystemC AMS 1.0 Standard and reference implementation offer a rich set of computational domains to tackle your mixed-signal system-level design and modelling challenges. During the last 10 years, SystemC AMS evolved from solely being an AMS modelling language to the foundation of creating advanced mixed-signal ESL design and verification methodologies. The comprehensive feature set of SystemC AMS introduces higher levels of abstraction and when applied correctly, answers your questions and needs such as: Which model of computation is best suitable for which problem? How to find the best trade-off between simulation speed and model accuracy? How to validate the small-signal frequency domain behaviour of my system using SystemC AMS?

At SystemC AMS Day, presentations will cover practical use cases explaining the fundamentals of the different execution semantics and where and how they can be applied at best.

Meet your industry peers and experts

The SystemC AMS Day is highly geared towards the industrial application of the SystemC AMS extensions and usage of the SystemC AMS reference implementation for mixed-signal system-level design and verification. Most of the presenters and topics are from the industry and show the practical use of SystemC AMS in real applications - this is not a research-oriented event.

You can meet with industry experts active in automotive, wireless and wired communications, and sensors & actuators industries to discuss the features and benefits but also the caveats and limitations of SystemC AMS. By sharing ideas and experiences, you will avoid “reinventing the wheel”, you can learn from your peers in the industry and use their ideas in your daily work.

SystemC AMS Day will offer plenty of time to engage with your industry colleagues, to start networking and to discuss the common challenges and solutions SystemC AMS offers.

Contribute to and be part of the future of SystemC AMS

After the formation of the SystemC AMS Standard effort in 2006, the release of the SystemC AMS 1.0 standard in 2010 only marks the beginning of a new era where AMS and digital HW/SW functionality can be designed and modelled together. Although very powerful from the start, enhancements to the SystemC AMS extensions are necessary to deal with e.g. dynamic time steps and to incorporate non-linear circuits and systems.

Presentations at SystemC AMS Day will address the requirements, use cases and modelling needs, help shape enhancements that will be incorporated by the OSCI AMS working group to further advance the standard. This means that your requirements can be integrated in future updates of the standard and reference implementation.

By sharing your application challenges and industrial perspective, you are able to steer the direction of the future of SystemC AMS!

Abstracts

For competitive and efficient development and production of mobile navigation systems simulations are required. They must be able to simulate components of various physical domains (optical, electrical, mechanical), different kinds of signals (analogue, mix-signal, digital) and variable abstraction levels in a reasonable time. This ambitious task – in consequence of high complexity of navigation systems – must be solved with the support of SystemC AMS. In this article the modelling and simulation of an inertial navigation system (a fibre optical gyro system) with SystemC AMS is presented. In this process details of good modelling of those systems will be given and shown how the preliminary modelling is verified with the first results. As a result of this article a virtual prototype of an optical gyro sensor is available (demonstrator), which can be compared with the real system.

Virtual systems platforms for supporting system design have been continuously gaining in importance over the years. They are successfully used for design space explorations during integrated circuit design. Also they can provide software developers with a development platform before silicon being available.
In the automotive field, electronic hardware/software solutions are used in an increasing way for control systems being considered as safety-relevant. Safety is one of the key issues of future automotive systems development. New functionality not only in the area of driver assistance but also in vehicle dynamics control and active and passive safety systems increasingly touches the domain of safety engineering. Future development and integration of these functionalities will even strengthen the need of safe system development processes and the possibility to provide evidence that all reasonable safety objectives are satisfied.

Virtual platforms can help in achieving the desired high level of functional safety by providing powerful means for the verification of hardware-software safety concepts. In the AutoSUN research project, new technologies for fast simulation and verification of analogue/mixed-signal systems have been developed. They have been integrated into a SystemC AMS-based simulation and verification environment. This presentation gives an overview over the platform, the implemented technologies and the targeted use cases.

The rising complexity of modern embedded systems and the ongoing integration of analogue and digital components lead to new challenges in verification. Analogue and digital parts have to be evaluated together as early as possible in the design process. For this reason, methods for the comfortable and fast simulation of mixed signal models are essential. In this contribution, a tool is presented that allows the automatic generation of SystemC AMS modules from Simulink models. To do so, the existing code generation with Real-Time Workshop was extended to generate not only a C++ representation of a Simulink model but as well an appropriate SystemC AMS wrapper and a test-bench in SystemC AMS to validate the result. With this, a very easy coupling of analogue parts of a system, designed in Simulink, with digital parts, described in SystemC, becomes possible. In addition, a simple API was defined and added to the code generation that allows dynamic access to model parameters at run-time. As a result, large test series with changing parameter values can be run automatically. Two examples from the domain of automotive electronics are used to show the equivalence of the generated SystemC AMS models and to compare its simulation performance with Simulink.

This abstract deals with efficient digital design verification focusing transceiver ASIC development. This is achieved by co-simulation of SystemC AMS and VHDL. The basic motivation for using SystemC AMS is to reduce design and verification cycles by speeding-up simulation runs. In this context we introduce SystemC AMS modeling on a high abstraction level. The main target here is control path verification by analog front-end data path abstraction. Hence, we introduce so-called “Virtual Data Path” (VDP) modeling comprising only signal parameters passed between modules, not the signal itself. Main signal parameters are signal frequency and signal strength. One could also consider signal offset, signal phase and additional information, too. The front-end modules are kept as simple as possible, keeping their core functionality to a reasonable degree. At the interfaces to the digital domain real signals are generated from the respective signal parameters.

Additionally, by a proper choice of the cluster sampling time, also depending on the test case, simulation speed can be (positively) influenced. For sure we have to find a trade-off between simulation performance and timing accuracy. Simulation performance is also influenced by the number of module calls. We try to reduce it by integrating as much functionality as possible into the modules. As an outlook it is planned to do transceiver performance/sensitivity simulations. As an efficient modeling technique for that equivalent lowpass representation of the analog front-end data path is planned. Further, a combination of VDP and equivalent lowpass modeling towards multi-level simulation is targeted.

An image acquisition system is a complex mixed-signal system composed by an image sensor combined with an image signal processor (ISP) and a central processing unit (CPU). A SystemC-AMS/SystemC-TLM virtual prototype of the image acquisition system has been developed. The analogue and mixed-signal (AMS) part of the sensor has been modelled using the timed data flow (TDF) model of computation (MoC) of SystemC AMS. The model takes into account a linear discharge of the photodiodes, the Bayer Filter light adsorption effect, hot pixels effect and the controllable integration time. The SystemC AMS model of the video sensor is integrated in a SystemC TLM 2.0 platform by wrapping it in a SystemC TLM module that sends the video stream and receives the control parameters. Simulations have been performed with a speed of 8 sec per simulated frame for a 2megapixels image, more than 800 times faster than the previously developed VHDL-AMS model of the sensor. Resuming, virtual prototyping of such a complex system shrinks time-to-market by anticipating many phases of the design-to-market flow, here the focus is on the validation of the embedded software. Future works will enrich the SystemC AMS model of the sensor with other non-idealities such as the dark signal non-uniformity (DSNU) and the photo response non-uniformity (PRNU).

The main goal of the behavioral SystemC model was to provide the means to close the gap between the application requirements and the specifications for the design implementation. The focus of the modeling was set on the conversion of the application environment into physical inputs for the IC model and the nonlinear digital regulation algorithms of the sensor itself. The application requirements were covered in test cases with automated or semi automated performance parameter extraction. The test cases and application environment where developed in Matlab/Simulink to make use of the libraries and functions but also to have a common simulation tool with external partners. The IC behavioral implementation was modeled in SystemC. The benefit of SystemC was the easy inclusion in Simulink with an S-function wrapper and the native support of the SystemC implementation in the Mentor Graphics design tools as a reference model. With this the gap between application requirements and design implementation was closed.

As embedded systems are now ubiquitous, any design process should interact in some way with the "physical (analog) world". System design is now moving more and more on the virtualization path, where entire systems can be modeled and simulated with a virtual platform, mainly using SystemC. Hence, there is a growing need to be able to model and interact with physical (analog) interfaces. This should allow system specification phases, as well as architectural considerations and embedded software integration. SystemC AMS offers a natural expansion to the current ESL and TLM design flows which are the de-facto standard.

SystemC AMS allows to model, plug-in and monitor analog mode of computation without losing simulation speed, and to understand the impact of such analog behavior in the context of embedded systems, timing, power, and software execution. Using such virtualization approach, internal aspects of the system can also be modeled. A state of the art example is an adaptive power control that samples the power consumption or temperature and makes the appropriate dynamic voltage frequency modifications. We will present an environment that allows to design naturally mixed TLM and AMS parts in a scalable way that supports both LT and AT simulations.

Today, the state of the art AMS flow is divided into digital and analog parts, after a common root dedicated to system specifications and virtual platform prototyping. For designing the digital parts, the state of the art is to use SystemC models for hardware dependent software development, architecture exploration, and performance analysis where simulation speed is key. The missing points that we tried to solve are concerns the integration of the AMS flow: there is a lack for modeling AMS systems at abstracted levels and SystemC AMS is the way to explore the functionality of analog parts, including automated system integration using the concept of AMS IP. In this talk, we will present the industrial requirements on design techniques which have been analyzed to define the new proposed AMS design flow from system-level to implementation. This flow is based on the IEEE 1685 standard, IP-XACT, which is already widely used for digital designs in combination with SystemC virtual platforms. We will see how IP-XACT can be the basis for the data backbone that is needed to introduce mixed-signal ESL (Electronic System Level) methods, including bottom up or top down modeling, SystemC and SystemC AMS model generation, properties checking and validation, model characterization or system requirements traceability.

14.30 – 15.00SystemC/-AMS System-level Model of a Near Field Communication (NFC) Radio Front-endBas Arts, NXP Semiconductors, The Netherlands

This presentation will demonstrate the application of SystemC and SystemC AMS for a system level model of a Near Field Communication (NFC) radio front-end. The idea of this work is both to enable the system architect(s) to quickly explore several configurations of the radio front-end as well as to extend the digital virtual prototype environment (VPE) with realistic analog behavior for enhanced software development. We will graphically show the behavior of the model when fed with a real-life NFC lab trace waveform.

For telecommunication systems it is very important to be able to test the copper line to the subscriber to ensure the quality of service. For Next Generation Networks there will be a move to pure digital transmission (DSL) to the subscriber where voice service will be provided by voice over IP technology. In such an “All Digital Loop” scenario the metallic access to the subscriber line will be lost because there is no more POTS or ISDN equipment in place. To still be able to test the copper line the so called “Metallic Line Testing” (MELT) is introduced. A SystemC AMS model of such a metallic line testing system was implemented.

The system consists of a line test controller, an analog mixed signal part, a high voltage subscriber line interface and a multiplexer for 16 channels in front. In addition to the line testing system the subscriber line with all kind of possible terminations (DSL equipment, telephones, signatures, …) and error cases (ground fault, short circuit, foreign voltage, …) had to be modeled. One big advantage of SystemC AMS is to combine different models of computation which can be mixed inside the model like: timed dataflow, electrical linear networks, linear differential equations and the SystemC event driven simulation. As everything is based on C++ it was also easy to include the C code of the line test controller into the model and so this model was extensively used to develop the line testing algorithms.

Range-based system simulations are favored in recent years to cope with the performance issues inherent
with standard multi-run simulations. Unlike to steadily varying the system parameters and simulating all of these parameter space realizations, deviations of system parameters are modelled in continuous ranges. When performing a range based semisymbolic simulation, one simulation run provides the result for all the modeled parameter deviations thus significantly reducing the computation effort. This work uses a semi-symbolic simulation environment integrated in the SystemC AMS framework to obtain a range based system response. Following the semi-symbolic potential of backtracking the resulting ranges to its parameter origin is used to identify parameter refinement candidates. Based on this techniques a refinement design flow is presented which is targeted to improve the robustness and accuracy of cyber physical systems.

Using a judicious combination of SystemC AMS and SystemC, we design, model and evaluate a monolithic grid-tie direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC) converter (commonly called inverter). A grid-tie inverter transforms a solar panel's DC output to AC output so that the phase of its AC output waveform exactly matches the phase of the power utility grid's AC waveform, enabling it to inject surplus output electrical power into the power utility grid. An extension of the single phase grid-tie inverter is the 3-phase grid-tie inverter. Each of the 3-phase grid-tie inverter's output waveforms match the phase of the corresponding waveform of industrial power utility grid output, each phase separated from the other by a constant 120 degrees. Our monolithic inverter design eliminates the complexities of existing discrete component designs, in compliance with each design requirement.